What I don't understand is how on earth could we manufacture a plane that has a button to "turn of tracking". Like who would ever have a reason to turn of the tracking of your plane? I just think someone is making up that story because they have no god damn idea what happened to the plane.

Mar 24, 2014, 02:07 AM

MFitz73

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Mar 24, 2014, 03:38 AM

Valhallalla

Quote:

Originally Posted by 34thStreetSurfing

What I don't understand is how on earth could we manufacture a plane that has a button to "turn of tracking". Like who would ever have a reason to turn of the tracking of your plane? I just think someone is making up that story because they have no god damn idea what happened to the plane.

The latest Time magazine had a story about this incident and explained some of these questions. Apparently these electronic devices would interfere with older rardar systems at airports so they needed to occasionaly be turned off. That is no longer the case but they've never bothered to eliminate the ability of these things to be shut down.

What gets me is that the NSA (or whoever) can track me anywhere in the world by the nifty cellphone I carry in my pocket and its built in GPS. But we can't track a giant friggin' aircraft? Time mag explains that the air carriers haven't fitted their aircraft with GPS due to the large expense involved. I'm no rocket surgeon but I say how about we do away with the on/off switch for the tracking devices and get every airplane a friggin' Garmin Nuvi? Instead of putting this technology that we do have into every plane beforehand we'd rather spend millions (billions?) after the fact searching for this thing. Just who is paying for all of this anyway?